Where Do Nonprofit and Civil Society Researchers Publish? Perceptions of Nonprofit Journal Quality

Abstract

The field of nonprofit and civil society studies has grown tremendously in the past few decades, and scholarly journals have played a central role in this growth by facilitating circulation of research in the academic community. To date, only three nonprofit journals are indexed in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and, as such, have an impact factor. There are, however, far more journals serving the nonprofit and civil society academic community. Thus, focusing solely on impact factors is not necessarily suitable for creating rankings or assessing journal quality in this field. Indeed, doing so fails to capture most scholarly publication outlets that focus on nonprofits and civil society. Seeking to overcome shortcomings of relying merely on impact factors, this exploratory study uses survey data collected from nonprofit and civil society researchers in the United States and Europe to provide insight into which journals they perceive to be quality outlets for nonprofit and civil society scholars. Our findings reveal that, while the impact factor can be one indicator of journal quality, newer outlets without an impact factor are also perceived to be viable outlets for publication by scholars in the field.